Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Long time no post, indeed. I wish I had a ton of exciting news to relate but meh, not so much.

Things have been fairly busy but not extraordinarily so. Had another gig working for PokerRoom at the WPT event at Niagara Falls, tackled tons of home improvement projects (at our actual home for once), and have generally stayed busy with all the monkey work that keeps me busy.

Exciting stuff, yes?

I haven't had time or motivation to play much poker over the last few months, and what I have played has been at Cake Poker. In a dumb, superstitious monkey move, I decided to give Cake a whirl after getting absolutely brutalized at Full Tilt of late.

Indeed, I know, very silly to claim that a certain site has it in for you, but it'd reached the point where I was absolutely certain I'd be knocked out of yet another Full Tilt tournament late with AA versus 36 sooooooooooted when I'd look down to see a dreaded monster starting hand, and that's no way to be playing. Cake isn't much to look at and the interface is clunky enough to almost rival Bodog, but it's definitely got some soft games. I've mostly been playing cash games, along with some of the double or nothing SnGs they offer with the top five doubling their buy-ins. Still a small sample size but those seem especially soft, even at the $50 and $100 buy-in levels, as a good third of the table seems to have absolutely no clue as to adjusting their play to a SnG structure like that.

Still plugging away at the day job, but the ties that bind are becoming increasingly flimsy. There's a decent chance of sizable layoffs at some point if the economy stays in the toilet and our stock continues to trade at a 5 year low, and I'm perversely almost hoping to be a victim, as they tend to offer nice severance packages and getting the hell out of here is long, long overdue.

In the same perverse universe I live in, I'm thinking about giving the house flipping thing a go full-time, as I've worked out a line of credit with one of our local banks that'll finally give me enough capital to comfortably tackle another flip. Obviously the timing could be better as far as market conditions, but central Texas has managed to avoid a lot of the housing carnage, the job market is still strong here, and people still need houses to live in. I still think I could make a go of it, especially if that was my full-time job and I tackled much of the renovation work myself. It'd be much work and a far cry from Flip That House, where investors make a few phone calls and conjure up a mythical profit of $150,000, but it'd beat the hell out of endless TPS reports and performance reviews seemingly every other week.

And look! No political talk at all! Still highly interested in such things but the impending Obama landslide pretty much does all of the talking necessary.